Posts Tagged «steam box»

There was a lot of hype surrounding the impending launch of Valve’s Steam Machine platform, but much of the excitement dissipated when the first wave of machines were delayed until 2015. Now, Alienware is going in alone, and shipping its own consolized gaming PC.

After a few months of closed testing, Valve has released a public beta version of Steam with In-Home Streaming enabled. In-Home Streaming allows you to stream any game from a host PC to a client (a Mac laptop or wimpy Windows netbook, for example). This will eventually be a key feature that allows for cheap, low-power Steam Machines in the living room that can stream games from a more powerful gaming PC. Read on for our hands-on impressions, and a video demo of me streaming Dark Souls 2 to my laptop while sitting on the toilet.

Since SteamOS was first released in December 2013, Valve has been quick to squash bugs and add much-needed functionality. It still isn’t clear when Valve will launch the final version of SteamOS (hopefully later this year), but it took a big step forward recently by releasing an ISO version that includes an easy-to-use Windows installer and dual-boot functionality. SteamOS also recently gained support for AMD and Intel GPUs.

At CES 2014, Valve unveiled 14 new Steam Machines that will (probably) be released in 2014. These machines, produced by over a dozen manufacturers, span the gamut when it comes to hardware specs — from the beastly Origin PC Chronos with two Nvidia GTX Titans, all the way down to some console-like boxes priced at $500, with mid-range CPUs and graphics cards. With so many price points and hardware variations, it’s fairly hard to work out which Steam Machine gives you the best bang for the buck. Fortunately, the folks over at Futuremark have got us covered.

Yesterday when CES 2014 began, Valve revealed 12 hardware partners that are going to help make its Steam Machine dream come true. We also got a look at a new third-party Steam Machine by CyberPowerPC that began at a price of $499. Now, just a day later, Valve has unveiled 13 Steam Machines, in all shapes, sizes, specs, and prices.

Those dastardly devils at iFixit have managed to get their mitts on one of Valve’s 300 Steam Machine prototypes and, of course, torn it down. Inside is a quad-core Haswell Core i5-4570, a Zotac GTX 780 graphics card, 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport (PC3 12800) RAM, and a 1TB 5400 RPM Seagate hard drive. If you wanted to build your own SteamOS-powered doppelganger, it would set you back around $1300 to match Valve’s Steam Machine part-for-part.

Late on Friday, December 13, Valve released the first public version of SteamOS. As you would expect, SteamOS is currently very rough around the edges — it is essentially just a version of Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) that has Steam pre-installed. If you’re interested in Valve’s latest machination, though, and toying with what might be the future of gaming, it’s well worth installing SteamOS in VirtualBox. Here’s guide on how to do just that.

The time for Linux gaming is finally almost upon us! Valve has confirmed that SteamOS will be released tomorrow, December 13. On the same day, 300 prototype Steam Machines and Controllers will be sent out to participants of the Steam Machine beta test. With sorrowful catch in its throat, Valve says that the hardware beta test will only take place in the US, due to the “regulatory hurdles” of sending prototype hardware out of the country — everyone and anyone will be able to download SteamOS to make their own Steam Machine, however.

Valve has been kind enough to reveal almost every detail regarding its upcoming attempt to bring PC gaming to the living room, the Steam Machine. The company has revealed the specs of various beta models that will be shipped out for testing, so we know the types of Machines we’ll be getting down the line. However, the one detail Valve has yet to reveal is the price. A third-party Steam Machine was recently revealed by iBuyPower, and with it, the price — an affordable $500.

Whether or not Valve’s Steam Machine changes the way we play PC games, the box is more or less a traditional PC that’s about the size of a large game console. The Steam Controller, however, is anything but traditional, as it removes analog sticks in place of circular touchpads and adds a Wii U-style touch screen in the center for good measure. All of the prototypes Valve created on the way to the Steam Controller are even weirder than the final product itself.

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